Virtual Lunch & Learn with Andreas Widmer, Jon Bachura, & Dr. Jay Richards

Hello there. Hi everybody. Welcome to another version or session of the Virtual lunch and learns that are still inspired now by our Gospel of Work program. I'm your host, Andreas Widmer. I'm the director of the SIOKA center for Principal Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America. And I'm joined by my colleague and today's co host, John Bakura, who's the director of our Catholic Entrepreneurship and Design Experience, or seed. The SEED program as we call it here at the SIOKA Center. And as always, we want to begin in prayer. John, would you mind leading us in prayer, please?

My pleasure. Andreas. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit.

Amen. Loving God, I am just beginning to realize how much you love me. Your son Jesus was humble and obedient. He fulfilled your will for him by becoming human and suffering with us. I ask you for the desire to become more humble so that my own life might also bear witness to you. I want to use the small sufferings I have in this world to give you glory. Please, Lord, guide my mind with your truth. Strengthen my life by the example of Jesus. Help me to be with Jesus this week as he demonstrates again his total love for me. He died so that I would no longer be separated from you. Help me to feel how close you are and to live in union with you. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

John, that was beautiful. Thanks for doing that. You pray beautifully and I just want to give you a plug there because you also. You're doing reflections now on the seed Instagram and on YouTube as well. Or where do you put it?

Trying to. Trying to do the Instagram daily and reflecting on the daily readings and answering the prompt of. What does this have to do with business?

Yeah. So for anybody who's watching and. And I, I believe it was a beautiful prayer, especially now for Holy Week. So. So check out what. What John does on the SEED Instagram page and follow that, you'll be inspired. He prays like this every, every day for us.

So.

So our guest today is the Jay Richards, who is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos center for Life, Religion and Family and the William E. Simons Senior Research Fellow in Religious Liberty and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. He's also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the Executive editor of the Stream and a former partner, or rather colleague of ours here at the SIOKA Center. And Jay is a prolific author, a prolific writer. He's the author, I think, of well over a dozen books now, many of them New York Times bestsellers. His latest one was Infiltrated and Invisible, the Human Advantage, Money, Greed and God, the Hobbit Party, and one of my favorites, Eat Fast Feast. And Jay actually also was involved as a creator and executive producer of several documentaries, including three of them that were actually wildly shown on pbs. So thank you very much, Jay, for taking our invitation and being here.

It's great to be with you.

You're back on the team, as we say.

Yes.

And because just until when we did the Gospel of Work, you were actually part of the team at sioka and you chipped in by speaking online a couple of times and being filmed for it. And I remember your first invention intervention in the Gospel of Work course. What, what actually made it into each one of the sections talked about that there is this false impression of Christians. And then you said, and economists, that work is a punishment, that it's a bad decision, so to speak. And can you double click on. On that for us?

Yeah. So let's do. Let's handle the kind of theological side first. And so we all, you know, have this vague memory of the first few chapters of Genesis. And we think about God's curse after the fall, after Adam and Eve, you know, declined God's invitation to eat from every tree of the garden. But for one, right. They decided, no, we're going to listen to the serpent. And also try this one that he, the one he told us not to. And God tells Adam, you're going to now work by the, you know, the sweat of your brow, and the land is going to resist your efforts. And so we have. That's such a vivid image that we think, oh, okay, work is a result of the fall. We wouldn't have to work if it weren't for sin. That's not what the text says at all. Right. At the beginning, before the fall, when God creates man and woman, first he says, let us make man in our image after our likeness. And so he says he made man in his image as this individual. And then he immediately says that he made them in his image, male and female. And then he commands and blesses them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. So that's the command and blessing right at the beginning. Remember, this is before the fall. And then as if to underscore the point, he prepares a garden and he puts them in the garden to till and to keep it. And so it's not just that this command to work, this commission to work happens before the fall. But in fact it's tied up in what it means to be made in the image of God. God creates superlatively. He can call things into existence out of nothing, simply by speaking, he creates the earth. And then we participate in part in what it means to be created in the image of the creative God is to be fruitful, that is to. To produce, use the, the land and the things that God has given us, to produce things that weren't there before. And then to multiply, to have children. And so no one says, well, having children is a result of the fall. No child in pain. Birth is a result of the fall, but having children is not. And so it very important to separate both work and childbirth, because they go together right as blessings. God both commands us and blesses us to do these things as humans made in the image of our Creator. That's not a result of the fall. The result of the fall is a kind of distortion of those things. So their work often is futile or it leads to heartbreak or to pain. That's the kind of key thing that's on the theological side. Then on the economic side, there's this assumption that labor is a cost in terms of. It's a bad, in this sense that someone, people would always, if they could, trade leisure for work. So we work because we have to, because there's scarcity in the world and we'll starve if we don't. We won't have money to pay the rent. So of course we're going to work because we have to. But left to our own devices, if we didn't have to, we would just exchange that for leisure. Which for economists just means it's not peeper sense of leisure, it's just not working right. Just hanging out by the pool. And again, I think that that misconstrues it. And we know that now from happiness studies, because people that don't work at all are generally really, really miserable, which is exactly what you'd expect. If working is a part of what it means to be made in the image of God, working in the sense of creating value, then you expect that people are going to be unhappy if they're not creating value. And so I think in both those ways, if we just think of work as a cost or as a result of the curse, we're just not going to understand what it is or what it should be.

Yeah. And then the second time, so this flows very nicely because the way that, that you appeared in the Gospel of Work the second time you talked, you Said the other misperception or misconception people have is that somehow the market economy, the career economy, was created through the Enlightenment. And you have a very different perspective. Not just perspective, but you have some different facts on that.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I mean, of course, in a sense a market is just a particular way of coordinating our activities. And so the idea that things could have prices or that we would exchange goods and services, none of that depends upon the Enlightenment. In fact, none of it even depends upon Western history. People have bartered and traded in cultures, you know, from time immemorial. What makes a modern market economy special and specific is a kind of, is a set of institutions and assumptions. One, of course, the most foundational one is just the institution of private property. That there are certain things that are proper, that properly belong to you. That again, that that idea is virtually nothing to do with the Enlightenment, secular or otherwise. I mean, if you want to find a sort of origin of the idea of private property, it's in the Bible. Two of the Ten Commandments presuppose this idea that we dignify by calling it a right to private property. But the commandment not to steal, right? So we're told not to steal. That implies that people have some things that are properly theirs that ought not to be sort of unjustly taken from them. And then thou shalt not covet. So in other words, don't, don't desire the things of your neighbor, your neighbor's wife, the guy's stuff that he has in his garage, we're not supposed to covet. So which again implies that there are certain things that are properly yours, there are certain things that are properly your neighbors, and you shouldn't confuse those things. So private property, that's the most foundational assumption of a market economy is that you have private property. We build on top of that things that contract law, which really just a formalization of that, reliable banks, a widespread non kinship based trust in which we can trust people beyond our narrow tribe. The kind of discoveries of the coordinating functions of trade, the mutual benefits of trade. I'm describing all these things that we associate with market economies. None of that depends upon the Enlightenment. And then in fact, if you actually sort of trace the key institutions that led to, you know, often called capitalism, but I'm avoiding that word because it's got so much baggage. But you find them in the city states of northern Italy in the 13th and 14th and 15th centuries, so even before the Reformation, but well before anything that could be sort of construed as the enlightened Enlightenment. So why do we associate this with the. These ideas of the Enlightenment? Well, it's probably just because they're kind of key figures, such as Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher, who kind of consolidated this wisdom and then made a particular argument in his book the wealth of nations in 1776. But Smith himself, scholars recognize new writings and reflections on these subjects that preceded him, including people like the Spanish scholastics. And so there's nothing sort of intrinsic to the Enlightenment. It's certainly nothing intrinsic to secular thinking that is sort of grounded in the modern market economy. Now, the fact that, of course, these things developed over time. Yes, of course it takes us a while to work these things out. But you could say this is the same thing about the abolition of slavery. I mean, the abolition of slavery, the very idea that humans ought not to own each other. This goes back to a very fundamental biblical and Christian conviction that it's just. So why didn't immediately abolish it? Well, it was the Christian west, the two times in history when slavery was abolished. Both times it was Christians that did it right. The first time in the Middle Ages and the pope forbade it. And in Europe, slavery was mostly completely. Had disappeared by the Middle Ages. Then it reemerged during the age of colonization, but in the face of strong theological objections to it. So I think the lesson from history is that even given centuries of teaching that everyone's made in the image of God, we just barely got rid of slavery because slavery is this kind of. That's sort of the way things work for most of history. In the same way, it took us a long time to work out the implications of certain economic and moral truths like private property. And so we didn't develop them until a particular moment in history. It doesn't follow that there weren't intellectual antecedents to this. And I think in both cases, the really important antecedents are biblical and theological. And there's nothing. There's kind of. There's no unique contribution of, say, Immanuel Kant or Hegel to the either the kind of creation of the modern market economy or its moral defense. So that's a long and yeah, involved answer, but that's. I hope I covered the basis.

I think it evolves in the different institutions and everything. And there's, of course. And so people think that just when you start to see it is that's the beginning of it. Of course, the roots and the developments and preparations went on for centuries and millennia.

Probably.

One of the unique aspects of the free Market economy is, is the acceleration of innovation. I'm actually not sure if you would agree with that.

But.

The acceleration of innovation because you gain to benefit from the innovation as an individual and therefore the incentive to innovate goes up and more people get access to this kind of thing. And it leads to. Actually, one of the books that you wrote that John and I are super interested in the Human Advantage. Do you think we will innovate ourselves out of work, which is sort of being talked about now.

Yeah, that is being talked about. And of course that's. That's the positive way of putting it, right. Is that we would become so innovative that we would not need to work. And so I think it's sort of. What's funny is you could sort of take this in a dystopian or a utopian way, right? So on the one hand, well, the robots were going to get really fast, smart robots, and they're going to do all the work. And so it's going to be awesome, right? We can just party all night, sleep all day. We're not going to need the kind of drudgery of work. The other side of that is, well, okay, it's going to make everybody or most people obsolete because it's. All the types of jobs that are going to be taken are going to be occupied by these machines. And so we're going to have this massive technological unemployment and a lot of what some people in literature calls are surplus people. That's the kind of dystopian side of this. I don't think either of those is right. I don't think it's. It's certainly not desirable that we would literally cease to work, as I said a minute ago, is that we know people are miserable if they're not creating value. And so if you're not creating value in some particular way over the long haul, I think people are just generally miserable. Now, that doesn't mean you're. There's lots of ways to create value, of course. A person, you know, a mother, for instance, who has children and decides, okay, I'm not going to work in the workplace and I'm not going to be registered by the federal government in terms of my, my income and get income taxes taken away, she's working, obviously, and she's creating value. So I don't want to imply the only way to create value is, you know, in what we would call business or in the market. But I think it would be a very bad thing if we were. Something about our technology caused us to cease to be able to create value in this particular kind of economic way. I don't think that's what's going to happen. I think what's going to happen is that the things that can be automated will be automated. And so there's a lot of stuff we're doing now that we either won't do in 30 years or we will do very differently. But I just do not believe the arguments and just do not buy them that somehow information technology is fundamentally different from other types of labor saving devices. I mean, the reality is that every technology that we develop, if it's popular, is going to make some old way of doing something obsolete. And so in a sense you might say, well, you know, if somebody was just using a hand plow, well then a tractor that pulls a plow is going to make that job obsolete. It's not going to make plowing obsolete, it's going to make that way of doing it obsolete. We imagine that information technology is somehow different because we imagine that it's actually going to not just kind of enhance our labor or make certain things obsolete, but it's going to make us obsolete. It's going to literally replace us. And I think that is almost entirely the result of kind of a science fiction informed imagination in which we're going to create these sentient machines that are literally going to replace us. Because the only way to replace us to be replaced would be to be replaced with every one of our properties. And in fact that's not at all what we see. And so I think the kind of lessons of information technology, by which I mean computers, Internet, robotics, all that stuff, is that, as you said, this is going to speed up the change of the types of work that we do. But it's also going to free us up to do different kinds of things in which our comparative advantage will change. So the real thing to worry about is just the disruption from the space of the pays a change. But don't spend your time worrying about Skynet waking up and having a bunch of sentient robots and stuff like that. It's just, it's just complete nonsense. There's no more reason to think a computer is going to become conscious than to think that a tractor is going to become an ox. Right? A tractor might have replaced an ox. It's not going to become an ox. We know what's happening inside computers. It doesn't have anything to do with what's happening inside our heads. So don't worry about that, worry about the kind of disruption and then focus on what Technology actually is, which is the product of human ingenuity and creativity. It's an extension of us. It's a kind of intellectual prosthesis by which we extend ourselves into the world. And so that means it can be good or bad. Right. Just as we can do evil stuff, we can do good stuff. It's the same thing with technology. Just as many good things as we can do with it. We'll be able to do bad things. But I've got really specific arguments for why I don't think that's going to displace us. But that's the kind of top line point is that I don't think the lessons of information technology is that it's going to make us obsolete or that it's going to just literally sort of replace all particular kinds of work. It's going to replace lots of the things that we're doing right now as we're doing it.

Jay it occurs to me that with this new free time that this innovative technology is going to create for me, that I would be able to focus more on the transcendent dimension of work. And I was curious if you, in your readings of free market economists throughout the ages, was there who really drove home ideas in terms of the transcendent nature of work in your mind?

Yeah. What's funny is that people sort of intuited it and so it's funny. I'll just use Adam Smith as an example. His big book, the wealth of Nations, I mean. Yeah. Is that he actually worried about certain types of factory work because he thought it was mindless and not dignifying to people. So unlike a kind of skilled trade where you would produce something, you know, let's say you're a cobbler and so you're, you're creating shoes and you work with a tanner. And it requires a particular type of techne, a type of skill. Right. In which you're creating something that you see what if your only job, especially once you had assembly line factory work, was just this kind of mindless, repetitive thing in which you're doing the work of a machine, is how Smith thought of it. And so he actually thought that type of work itself was, was it sort of appropriate to the human person? And I actually think that's right. And it's funny, it's that kind of work, that's the work most likely to be automated. And so we shouldn't, you know, that that is a kind of temporary artifact of a particular way of creating stuff. But once those kinds of things are automated, it allows us to more time, I would argue, to do the kinds of things that are more appropriately and uniquely human, which is the actual creation of, of new ideas and new forms. That's, that's the thing that's I think, more kind of appropriately human. And in some cases the, the doing that with your hands. I mean, here's the kind of irony I said, I argue that there's a kind of post industrial desire that people have for things that are made by hand, right? So even though you can get a machine made, you name it, right? I can get a hydroponic, I can get hydroponically grown Boston Bibladas. At Costco, we could assume, let's imagine it's all done by robots with drones, right? In, in factories and no humans are involved. And yet people will often spend five times more buying things at a farmer's market from farmers that they know nearby. Right. And so don't like the first temptation, if you're into economics, is to get sniffy about people wasting money. Right on that. What I want to know is why are people making that choice? And I think what they're doing is that they're saying, look, yeah, okay, I could shop at Costco, but there's also a value in this other thing. And so I think that it could be that what you will actually get is what I call in the book bespoke labor, in which a new type of market emerges which have lots of stuff that's being produced in an automated way that start cheap, but then people, for various complex reasons start preferring things that are initially luxury goods, these products of bespoke labor. So that the future of work is not just going to be intellectual. Right? That's the sort of, oh well, just it'll all be with a really smart creative class and the designers. No, but that there will actually be that things like skilled trades will themselves actually have a greater premium and a greater value, even though they cost more. People actually value those precisely because they're different from the stuff produced by an automated source. And so it's a bit of a complicated argument, but I think there's already evidence of that happening. And the evidence would be places like D.C. where you can shop at Costco, having 50 tiny little local farms within 10 miles of the district where people will grow these things and there's a market for it. There's, I think there's, that's the harbinger of what's, that's what's actually going to happen. It's not actually going to be everything produced by robots. All the time.

Yeah, I'm concerned. So it's interesting to me that these LLMs are, you know, what's the chat GTP came up because, you know, as you all know, or many of you, I was very involved in speech recognition. And interestingly, it's basically the same technology. This is. I reject the term intelligence, but of course it depends how you, how you define intelligence. I would say intelligence sounds like human and this is not human. And it cannot make inferences the way that and the emotion that humans can do. So. So these computers cannot imitate God, you know, they do not participate in God's creativity, as you said. And it's a completely different thing. But I'm not writing it off in the sense that I think it's an amazing technology. Just quickly. So all of this comes, you know, when we did speech recognition, we would, we would analyze millions of documents to create the probability of what word follows what other word. And the more words you predeceasing, the more, you know, you're sure in what the next one is going to be. And speech recognition, here's this translates this into zeros and ones. And then Pullman comes up and it has, you know, that's what you see in Siri today, very high. This is an extension of this going in, taking, doing these language models and spitting out only what you give it, right? Only what you give. This is why Bloomberg now can come up with the financial side of things. Imagine if you have specialized text that is actually more reliable, then this becomes a really good tool. My concern, Jay, is in a sense what John talks about. My concern is for truth. So the real danger chat, GTP and LLMs in general do is that they're going to be used the wrong way. It's almost like when you back in the printing press and that was an issue that you could print and everybody thinks it's true.

That's right.

We are back at that inflection point that you could print. You know, if it's from the Internet, it's got to be true. And it's not just a text. But now, and that's the more dangerous part is with the photography that you can project things with voice with, even with moving, you know, with video and everything. Tell me a bit. So, so we talked about, are they going to replace us? No, probably it's an enhancement and you know, that technology is going to replace us. Think of how little technologies I had when I started my career in the 80s and how much I have today and whether I'm less busy today than I was before. I wasn't. I'm just more busy. So.

Yeah, yeah, you. I think you're exactly right. I mean, ChatGPT is a nice lesson in part because it's so obviously biased. Right? I mean, this is a whole cottage industry now on social media, people asking these questions, and it either will refuse to answer if the question is not politically correct, or it gives you the kind of expected left wing.

Dave, what fascinates me is this is like training a monkey or a bird to repeat what we're saying. We're offended by what it says, which tells you what kind of BS we're storing on the Internet because it comes back attitude. This is a mirror, guys. It's a mirror. It only knows what we're talking.

Well, and in this case in ChatGPT, this was. It's quite clear that the guys in charge, look, they engineered it to give these kinds of answers. And that's the kind of key lesson, is that if you thought you were dealing with an actual intelligence or an agent, you're getting statistical algorithms that have been designed to produce certain outcomes. It's just like with a statistical model, it doesn't tell you anything you didn't tell it to tell you. It's just that it's very complicated. I mean, so I'm sort of glad that it's so obviously biased because it illustrates that, that it's like. Yeah, of course it's, it just shows you the bias of the, the designers. Because I've always thought the term artificial intelligence is the greatest marketing couple in all of civilization. If we had called this sorting Statistical algorithms, right? It's just like nobody, there'd be no movies about it. Nobody would be worried about it, right? It's so boring, you wouldn't even know what it was referring to.

Actually, I think technologically you call it. I think technologically, these LLMs, they use something called hidden Markov models. So if you call it what it is.

Yeah, good name. No, it's not a good name. It's terrible marketing. And you wouldn't imagine that it's some kind of qualitatively different thing than something else, right? But it's because the language, language plus our kind of imaginations and Hollywood about what machines and robots do, we just. Our imagination kind of gets the better of us. And I think that's, that's the risk. I mean, the reality is, while I'm kind of emphasizing that don't, let's don't panic about AI waking up or taking all of our jobs or making us obsolete. I am not saying these technologies don't have the potential for great evil. They do because humans have the potential for great evil and they can use these. And so if insofar as these enhance the power and reach and influence of particular bad actors, they can do bad things. I mean that's, look, you know, OxyContin is a technology. It's great if you have excruciating pain. It's also highly addictive. Fentanyl, the same thing. Really great if you're in excruciating pain. Highly addictive and deadly if you don't get the dose. Exactly right. Drugs are a type of technology, social media, language models, all of these are technologies and they can be used for good or for ill. And some of them are highly, highly addictive. I mean, I've spent some time now in the last year just reading about what social media does to young kids brains and I, most of it's really bad. You know, look, I'm. Nobody would accuse me of being a Luddite or you know, hating technology. I also don't think that we should be letting kids on social media because I just think it's bad for their brains. And so both of those things can be true. You can, you want to have the most rational and balanced understanding of the realities of technology and technological trends, but you can also make decisions about the various dangers that are involved.

Would you, I mean we. So I'm again, I'm concerned about how do we deal with the output, you know, and, and how do you distinguish between what's generated and what is true. So the generated things gives you, it's almost like a standard by the way. You know, you read this letter, the six month, what do they call, stop gap measure that that's out there on the Internet now to say let's stop this for 6 months GTP version 4. And just until we figure out a little bit. And I think it's interesting, I don't think that is going to happen in a million years by the way. I think it's an interesting and valuable intervention to say our, our, our common moral understanding of what, of how to deal with this isn't, isn't there yet. So maybe we should have some definitions before we move on. It's like that's the classic issue of technology I think here and I don't know if you agree, but here we do have a real issue because truth is at stake.

Oh absolutely. Truth is at stake. And I do think, I mean in some ways here's the Sort of ideal is that we become more sophisticated users and consumers of this. So once, in principle, once you know a deep fake video is possible, then your trust in any particular video should go down. Right. If you're being really rational, I now know that you can create this fake video of Joe Biden looking like he's saying a specific thing. And so my trust in any particular one that appears to me should go down in the same way as, you know, sort of any of these technologies. Just as my standards for what an AI can do. Right. The better Google got, the better we got at realizing, okay, there's things that seem like they're kind of intelligent answers, but in fact there's not actually a person behind this computer at Google giving me answers. Right. If you showed Google to somebody in the 1950s, they probably wouldn't do that. Right. They would be, they'd be fooled. And so ideally, if we are properly educated and critical in our thinking, we become more sophisticated consumers of these things. Unfortunately, I think what we have is the technology moving really, really fast and our moral and intellectual capacities not so that our discernment is actually we're losing capacities for critical thinking and discernment at the very moment when our technological abilities to fool people are growing exponentially.

It's one of those big things that I lament. You know, Michael Novak was one of our initial partners here at the SIOKA center, and he talked about society being made up of three spheres. And there's the economic sphere that also does all the advancement and technological innovation and everything in this. And there's the government sphere that keeps us supposed to keep us safe and have the, you know, building the roads and government and all that kind of stuff. And then there's the civil sphere, which is where culture comes from. And he says the three things together create prosperity right at the moment when in the civil sphere our culture is starting to say there is no truth, the economic sphere is starting to develop a product that actually underlines that and serves you truth. Anything you want, Right. That's very dangerous. That's a very dangerous coincidence. Or maybe it isn't a coincidence.

Well, it is. And so, I mean, because there's feedback, right? So technology, I mean, our technology is a reflection of our culture, but it also shapes our culture. In fact, that's, that's always true. Every, every major revolution usually happens alongside some kind of technological revolution. And I think we're seeing that now. I don't think anyone at this point would deny, say that the smartphone has cultural effects. Right. And so yeah. The problem is, I think there has been a kind of a decay on the cultural side in Novak sense. Right. The kind of cultural sphere in which people's virtue and their discipline and their wisdom have not kept pace. So that most people, I think, are unfortunately easily fooled. I do think, you know, in principle there's always ways to handle this. Somebody in the chat, I think Jim Bohr pointed out that, yeah, math teachers had to take account of the ubiquity of calculators in the 70s and 8 and 80s and we're having to do this now. Of course, if you're a business professor that, that has essay tests, you got to run the texts right through search algorithm to make sure somebody's not copying it. We have to do the same darn thing with Chad, right, with the AIs. And so there's a kind of a way to keep up. So I just don't think that. I think the problem is that we probably a lot of us lack the kind of intellectual discernment, which is what wisdom is, to actually kind of handle these things. And that, yeah, I mean, look, that, that worries me like crazy.

But couldn't it be so I'm somebody. To me, the glass is always half full. Okay. I'm not, I'm never a half glass, glass half empty guy. I think there is, there is going to be a reaction that once you had your fill of social media and you get, you were doped or duped long enough and you start to see that half this stuff just isn't true and the video started to be created and eventually humans are going to go, no, actually I'm not going to do that anymore. I want, I want the actual relationship and know what truth is, because we're wired for this. The same is. And I think there will be a reaction to this, to more wholesome relationships. Again, once we've tried that and we sort of numbed ourselves with it, I think we're actually going to take from it. And I don't think that social media in that sense is going to grow the way it is growing or even have the penetration it has right now. On the education side, something that we're talking about at the Bush school is, I think there as well, we will change the way we use technology. So on the one hand, I've introduced ChatGPT into my classroom where actually there's a whole. Tomorrow they're going to come back. I have like 20 students who are working with chat GTP to solve a problem, to say, show me a profitable way to solve this problem and to see it's aggregate information, it's just Google, in my opinion.

Sure.

But on the other hand, what we're talking about is to say maybe we go back to oral examination, which is a better idea anyway. Right. I love that idea. And let's put five people in a room and just be very efficient and just have people come through. Because then it's also, you know, because we want to put the person in the center of education, let's do that by actually putting the person back in front of us. I think there will be movements like that. Just like after you have the cheap Chinese products, you go back and say, you know what, I want something handcrafted in America. I think there's movement like that.

You know, it's funny that you say that because as you know, my girls are, you know, they're just at the age that, you know, we didn't have to decide, okay, are we going to give our daughters smartphones when they're four? Because we didn't. There weren't smartphones when Dr. For and so things sort of came online at about the right time. And then we got our girls smartphones and limited social media. Frankly, I can say this now so that I could track them with the map app. That's, that's the dirty little secret. Right? But they themselves are watching their peers and younger peers who were just kind of marinated in this stuff that don't have a two second attention span. And you know, my, my older daughter is getting married here in a couple of weeks and we overheard her and her fiance talking the other night. I don't think they knew my Jenny and I were actually listening, but they were talking about their children and social media and they're like, oh no, we're. Our kids aren't going to have smartphones until like the very last minute. They're gonna have these really basic phones and they're not going to have any access to social media until they're well into their teen years or whatever. And so they themselves, right, they're like, they're realizing they're looking at their peers like we're not doing that with our kids. And so I'm hoping that that's what's going to happen, that there's going to be a reaction. I mean, the good thing about knowing something about history is that, you know, that cultural decline doesn't happen forever. It waxes and it wanes. And so I'm hoping that that's right. I do think the, one of the key things that we have to deal with is the rapidity of technological disruption and the fact that it happens so much more quickly than human culture or the human brain can necessarily adapt to. So we are not well adapted to be networked to hundreds of millions of people. We're naturally social creatures, but we don't know what that's like. And so when kids that haven't been given discernment or suddenly let loose on Instagram and TikTok, I think it probably messes with their brains. And so I think that's the kind of reality of the situation. It's not the first time this has happened. Every major technology brings with it some costs. I mean, I think probably literacy, for instance, in the reading of text on codex has probably made a lot of us more nearsighted than we would otherwise be, for instance. And so Plato complained about the fact that a culture of reading would lead people to have not nearly as good of memories. Right. Or he tells the story of Socrates complaining about this. I think it's probably right. You know, oral cultures probably can remember entire epics and we can't. And so I think right now we're just dealing with a very serious downside to some technology that also has a huge upside. And so in every case the right answer is, okay, well, we want to maximize the upside and mitigate the downside. Right.

Well, Jay, I think that speaks to the question in the chat from Peter McNally, is there, you know, how do we hedge this return to the mean and the potential for maybe even a de evolution of our capacity intellectually in terms of reason and discernment? You know, what, what are your thoughts there? And perhaps even your thoughts in terms of like proactively, you know, working on this problem, especially as a parent, you know, you got my attention. Yeah, I got a 14 year old daughter at home. So, you know, what are your thoughts there?

Oh, well, I'll just tell you, don't let her use social, don't let her use Instagram and Tick Tock. Don't let Tick Tock be in your house. I could go on and on about Tick Tock in particular, but it's highly addictive. I think that, I mean, look, we know this. We don't let our little kids, you know, just, we don't give them the keys to the car. And so you want to kind of increasing cone of responsibility in which we give kids just as much responsibility as they're actually able to handle. Not too little or you're a helicopter parent. Not too much. Right. They're, they're sort of out of control. So it's the kind of sweet spot between overexposure and quarantine is inoculation or immunization. And so that's what, that's what you want. You know, I mean, the reality is I, I think, if anything, I think discernment. By discernment, I mean the ability to separate and sift truth from error. The premium on that is going up rather than down. This is why, for instance, good aggregators online are so valuable. That's why we tend to follow, whether it's on Twitter or we have particular bloggers or substacks that we follow. It's because these are people that are really good at sifting this stuff out. And so I think that that skill that I'm calling discernment or wisdom, I just think it's going to be ever more valuable as the total, just total amount of stuff, information good, bad and indifferent, continues to increase. And just the ability, the sophisticated ability. For instance, everybody knows somebody like this. So all of us have maybe in laws or parents who don't. They don't seem to have the critical faculty to be able to tell this is a fake marketing email, don't forward this to me. Right. And then other people that seem to be. They have this preternatural ability to tell, right. And so that's, That's, I think, a really, really valuable skill. We got to figure out how to cultivate that in ourselves and our children. Right. So that we just. That. But that really is, that's a separating truth from error. And in this case, it's just that, I mean, Andreas is talking about, is that just a massive flood of potential sources of error and misrepresentation that we have to deal with. On the other hand, I can tell you, I mean, Andreas, I wrote a book called the Price of Panic, which was about the stupidity of the lockdowns, basically what it was about. And it was frustrating because you'd get a scientific paper that would come out on some analysis, and we were writing a book, this is in the spring of 2020, right at the beginning, and everybody thought we were insane. And an article would come out in some relevant journal, British Medical journal or something, and we would see it and then we would watch over a few days as Google buried it, literally buried the story. On the other hand, we were able to find it in real time and not have to leave, leave the house. Right. To find the information. And so that's, that shows you that this technology is Janice face. On the one hand, these Big, really. Aggregators like Google can control and manipulate your access to it, but you have access to information at a much greater rate than you could ever have had before. I literally never had to leave the house for a highly documented book on this stuff because I had a continual Internet connection. And so I always try to remind myself that, yeah, this is a dangerous tool. There's a lot of bad stuff, but it's. I prefer it to the alternative. Yeah.

So since you work a lot right now with state legislatures and things like that, do you think that this. Is this going to be technologically solved, the issue of truth, and that you see what was generated by LLMs or what photos are manipulated or not, is that going to be. Do you think that there will be a technological solution first or a legal solution first? I mean, we saw an Italian.

Yeah, I do think. I like the fact that different countries have different responses to these things. I honestly think Italy is. Look, I think free speech is valuable, and I really don't want the government sort of controlling these things. On the other hand, I think we need to recognize that these technologies are dangerous. And so something like. I'll just give a really simple example. All of these platforms have the ability to sift porn, right, and keep it from showing up. The reason that there was a section 230 in the Communications Decency act of 1996 was that legislators said, we want to allow these platforms to be able to remove porn, but still be platforms rather than publishers. Now, what did they use the Section 230 power to do? They didn't use it to remove porn. I still have porn showing up on Twitter. What they did is used it to remove stuff they didn't like politically. So they did the kind of very opposite thing. And so I honestly think a kind of. We need a mix of competition so that as long as there's multiple sources of information, then at least those that kind of know how to use the tools can find it. So I prefer market competition for that. But then I. But I do think that legislation and regulation has a role to play when it comes to these really straightforward things about exposure to kids. Here's what I'm hoping will happen. So just my dream, probably not going to happen is that the threats of regulation of these things will cause these companies to say, okay, look, we need to police ourselves better. And so they'll do what Hollywood did, which is to create the mpaa, which is a rating system that rates movie, you know, movies according to violence and sexual content. It's not a government system. It's kind of a self policing thing. Right now they're not self policing. They're letting highly addictive, highly dangerous kind of content often having to do with self harm just kind of, you know, just sort of spread itself out. And so, so yeah, I'm kind, I'm kind of hoping that we'll end up with some kind of mixed response, I suppose.

Suppose. And, and again, just going back to our friend Michael Novak, who would say that then the most important thing is of course in all of this, the family and, and morale coming out of our civil society that we form kids who know right from wrong and who have the practical wisdom to read something and say this cannot be true. Right. And so we're of course always looking. This is always, this is always when my flash goes up, when I'm, when we look and saying is it going to be government or business? Who's going to solve it where all along it should be actual civil society. But we think of it because we've undermined it so far.

That's right, we have. And that's why, you know, it is going to be ultimately up to parents and civil society. What we don't want is for the market for technology and for government to be undermining that. Right. They're not to usurp and replace the institutions of civil society, but we should ideally not want them to undermine it. I mean, an example I would use would be, for instance, I don't really think there's, we're going to be able to tweak the tax code so that people will start having more kids than they do right now, even though we're not at replacement rate. On the other hand, it's dumb that we have a marriage penalty so that if a couple has a baby and they're not married and they decide to get married, they actually have to pay more in taxes. Right. That's called the marriage penalty. That's dumb. And so we should at least be able to reduce the kind of harms even if we recognize that, okay, it's not ultimately going to be governments can solve these problems.

Let me see if somebody has a quick question. John, you go ahead, but if anybody put your hand up and I'll come around you. We have like 10 minutes left to.

Piggyback on the Novak side of things. Like, you know, in chapter five of Business as a Calling, he talks about the integrity of business practices depends on the virtue of the people who constitute its many firms. And I'm curious your thoughts on is it possible for us to Train up our own AI? Could we feed it the Magisterium and every good business book and thereby kind of create like a virtuous business, entrepreneurship focused AI?

Why not? Absolutely we could. I mean that's what chat gp. I mean, look, this particular popular one that we're dealing with right now, it shows in this case the distorting biases of the programmers and the team, right. That set it up. There's no reason that we couldn't make a better one and make a more virtuous one. It's just that, you know, I mean that's actually, I think that's a challenge to us, honestly, because there's no reason in the world that that wouldn't be possible.

It's so, I mean, kudos to, to what was it? Who came out with the financial version of the things? Bloomberg.

Yeah, that's.

Guys, that's the easiest product you can figure out right now is to take a corpus of work and feed it to it. And you know, it's like garbage in, garbage out. Like if you have like you would have the Magisterium and you put that all in, use that in a vacuum, it's going to give you one quality of answers. So if you have all this information on finance and these people have, I mean everything that Bloomberg has as data has an overall higher propensity for being actually true than on everything that's on the Internet. For finance professionals, this is a, this is an easy, easy product.

Chat JP2 would be awesome, right? The man published something every seven days of his papacy. I mean like Chat JP2, you heard it here, Somebody gathered.

I know this very moment. That's gold. Absolutely. I mean this is what actually. I mean what. Yeah, what you need is a kind of AI shell that would allow people to actually adapt it for these much more specific reasons. And so that's why I'm talking that when I'm talking about competition, I honestly think that's. As long as I could say just use the example, finding a relevant kind of scientific paper. As long as it's out there and you kind of know how to search for these things, you can find it. And in the same way the deep fake stuff, I mean a good example would be some of you will remember, was it in 2000, when was that 2004, when that famous. It was during the presidential election in 2004 in this letter that turned out to be fake by. It was supposed to be a letter from the commander of George W. Bush when he was in the Air Force. I think it was the reserves in Texas. And it came out and, you know, Dan Rather did this story on CBS about it. It was supposed to be a big scandal. And then it was just some guy. It was a guy that was a type typewriter expert, blogger. And then somebody else dropping it into Microsoft Word and noticing, oh, this just follows the standard default on Microsoft Word blew the whole thing up. That was the kind of glory days of the Internet, right? When you really did have that kind of information competition. That's kind of honestly what I'm hoping with Elon Musk and Twitter, you just need a source that kind of breaks the. The kind of uniform propaganda, I think, to break, to blow this stuff up. That's why I'm still sort of hopeful.

That source only happens if we have competition and not oligarchy.

That's right.

I think. Fred. Fred, did you have a question? I saw. He signaled me. Yeah.

Hey, Jay, how you doing?

Fred Sote, who helped start the Siocher center here and teaches at the Silker center as well.

So, two things.

One, I want to defend economists for a second at the beginning, just to make sure. The way I understand it is that economists at the margin believe that there's a disutility of labor.

Right.

That doesn't mean right as a whole is seen as problematic, but it's just that at the margin you will eventually trade labor against other things. The second thing I wanted to ask you, Jay, is you probably are not aware of that because my paper has not been the most successful one, but I wrote a paper on alertness and Aristotle in which I argue that Krosnerian alertness can be understood the way, using Aristotle's theory of the soul, the soul being immaterial. And it actually fits really well Kuzner's view and theory, because one of the things Kirzner argues is that there is no opportunity cost to entrepreneurial discovery. So you don't give up anything when you actually discover something else, something new, which is very difficult for most economists to fathom. But I think once you understand the immateriality of the soul, and therefore you get that. I was wondering in your philosophical musing if you have anything to say about this idea that the reason maybe fundamentally why AI will never go anywhere eventually is because the mind is not mechanical. It's a material. If you're in the Cotillion Thomas view, and that we can be as sophisticated as we want in the physical world, this will never match the. The idea of. Of an immaterial intellect. So I was just wondering if you had any comments on.

Absolutely, yeah. And that's exactly my view. I mean, my view is sort of Thomistic here. So, you know, that's kind of strictly Aristotle by himself, but the Thomistic synthesis of, of Neoplatonism and, and Aristotle, so that the mind is ultimately immaterial, though the human person is not this kind of disembodied mind stuck in a, in a body, right, where this body, soul unity, that the mental operations are not themselves mechanistic and material operations. And so we can come up with models in which we sort of metaphorically apply this to our ways of thinking. But there's no reason in the world to think that what happens in a computer is, you know, the same kind of thing that's happening in the mind. The reason people assume it is is because they have a materialistic premise. So if all you have is matter in motion, all you have is chemistry, right? Then whatever is happening in the mind must be reducible to material causes. Right? And so, of course, if you're materialist, you have reason, given your premises, to be terrified about AI. Because, look, if we can be agents, this is actually how the strong AI debate goes. I've seen it with Ray Kurzweil, right? Is that they will argue that, well, when computers get fast enough, they will become conscious because of course, we eventually evolved consciousness and we're just material things. But then when you make arguments about, yeah, but minds deal with the level syntax and not semantics, and we know we have meaning and we have intentionality, and then. And so mind is a different thing. Kurzweil will say, well, who's to say that we're minds either, you know, and so either they want to say that computers, you know, eventually get to our level because we did it under material, purely materialistic causes. And then if you challenge that, they'll try to downgrade humans the level of machines. So either machines become minds or minds are really just machines that you see, that's just the sort of limited set of options you've got when you're a materialist. And so I think, look, that's a good argument for not being a materialist. I do think that you don't have to get that far out, though, sort of in the metaphysical just to. There's some really kind of straightforward reasons to think that what we do in computers is just not going to. There's no reason to think this is going to become. These are going to become agents or, you know, they're going to understand meaning and have qualia and have thoughts about things. And so yeah, all that's back there and this is the reason, honestly that I'm interested in this subject is because in artificial intelligence you get technology and economics and metaphysics and philosophy and anthropology all kind of intersect. And that's what I think makes the subject fascinating.

Thanks. That's a good, good exit point. I think it's just on top of the hour, Jay. It's always inspiring to have you around. I recommend all these books, especially this last one, the the Price of Panic, but also the. What is it called? Fast Feast and Pray.

Fast Feast, Eat Fast Feast.

I followed that, Jay. We live close and we went through some of the COVID Bubble together and they inspired me to follow this and I recommend that book and personally benefited greatly from it. But also just that you, you know, you worked with us and we had a super time and we're really inspired just like you inspired us now when you work with us. And I also want to thank John for being my co host. We're going to start this. We're playing with the format guys. We'd love to have your feedback on what other interesting topics that we could cover. And we want this sort of to be a mix between the podcast for the podcast you're in so you can actually ask the question while you're in the podcast. So I'd love to get your feedback on that. We will have, I think at least one more before before summer. I hope that you will all join us for that. In the meantime, I wish you all a happy, blessed Holy Week and then a beautiful and blessed Easter. Thanks for your time, everybody.

Thanks so much.